Donald Does Dusty

Margaret Kirk looks forward to a work from the King of the Drag Kings
EVENT PREVIEW BY GARETH K VILE.
PUBLISHED IN THE SKINNY 02 MARCH 2009


Diane Torr creates work that is humorous, intimate, accessible and serious. Emerging from her formidable intellect and compassion, Donald Does Dusty has a personal origin, but encompasses broader matters.

DDD is a tribute to her brother. “He died of Aids in 1992, and was an extraordinary person, going from this housing estate near Aberdeen to be a wealthy property dealer in London,” says Torr. “He died at 43, and seemed so unfair that he never lived to enjoy the fruits of his labour.”

The show homes in on Donald’s youthful fascination with Dusty Springfield. “My brother somehow knew that Dusty was a lesbian. She was like a light for him,” she recalls. Perhaps importantly: “He performed Dusty – I’d be the one who watched him.” This was Torr’s first contact with drag. “He would dress up in my mother’s clothes – her evening dress and fur stole, long diamante earrings. Then I’d get bored, and he’d throw a tantrum.”

Since Torr is most famous as a drag king, with both workshops and performances, this early encounter appears crucial. As Donald was an actor, his influence on Diane’s path seems key. “He would make jokes that he would dress up as me and I’d dress up as him, and we’d perform together – but it never happened because he died.”

Donald Does Dusty is a personal work, but grapples with themes of gender identity, family relationships, inspiration and mourning. Torr’s consummate stagecraft, sensitivity and desire to communicate with the audience promises a moving and thought-provoking evening.

Pushing Boundaries: Arches Live! 2009

BLOG POST IN THE SKINNY BY GARETH VILE.
PUBLISHED 23 SEPTEMBER 2009


Since Jackie Wylie took over at The Arches, it has pushed the boundaries of drama towards Live Art: the rebranding of the Spring festival as Behaviour, an increase in the number of RSAMD graduates presenting work, a jaunt across to the Fringe with the challenging Trilogy – where it caused a pleasing controversy. Arches Live! kicked off this year with risks. Young artists, some barely out of further education, dominated the Saturday night. Pleasingly, they offered the most consistent evening of any Arches festival yet.

Although the subjects ranged from internet dating to family relationships, the quality and attention to detail was shared across the shows. And if the formats blew a hole in pre-conceived notions of what makes entertainment, the sincerity and professionalism kept the audience involved. The obvious budget constraints and challenge of The Arches’ space – the train rumbles and cold, brick walls could turn a Pavilion pantomime into a meditation on urban isolation – were used against themselves.

Chip came from Glas(s) Performance, the team behind the charming Junction 25. Like Junction 25’s work, Chip dealt with family: this time, the relationship between founder Jess Thorpe and her dad. Thorpe and her father drew a moving picture of their friendship, stuttering over the misunderstandings but celebrating their shared qualities, from nice arses to enthusiasm for risks. In little over an hour, Thorpe snr revealed his love for his daughter, without ever pretending to be able to understand everything about her. Jess Thorpe – taking the lead in the performance art activities - homed in on those details that created their bond, even as she confessed to adolescent tempers.

While intensely personal, Chip caught the universal ties between fathers and daughters, telling a simple, specific story and finding its resonance. Kieran Hurley’s Hitch did the same thing, this time in a far more political and global context. By telling of his journey to the Italian G8 summit, Hurley avoided the anti-capitalist clichés and revealed a personal vision of protest and engagement. The subtle musical backing, the slide shows and video snatches – perfectly edited for the YouTube generation – spoke of his idealism, his fear, and never hiding the emotional behind bravado.

Downstairs, Your Are Not With Me was an intimate show for two audience members. Made up of internet chat sequences, it grappled with the loneliness of online daters, the problems of virtual love and larger questions about attraction and – albeit mildly – obsession. Without condemning, it presented the looming neediness that cowers behind long email conversations, the gradual unfolding of personality and the crushing disappointment of eventual rejection.

If Midland Street failed to live up to the other performances, it was only because it was subsumed into the mayhem of Death Disco. Made up of a series of performance installations, it felt tangential to the fun of the night-club and lacked a real connection to either the space or the event. The fighting animals were funny, the full scale poker games distracting, and it included the club in the festival – and the festival in the art – without ever making the link clear. After three shows of casual excellence, it was muted.

Scottish Opera Five:15

Scottish Opera continue to explore new ways of making high art accessible to new audiences.

EVENT REVIEW BY MARGARET KIRK.
PUBLISHED IN THE SKINNY 04 MARCH 2009


The thrill of Scottish Opera’s Five: 15 programme lies in the proximity of the audience to the performers. More used to a large stage, their movements and emotions are exaggerated and powerful: in an intimate setting like Oran Mor, they are overwhelming. With the orchestra situated behind the stage, and the simple set almost imitating a classical Greek theatre, with two stairwells, a raised platform and a front stage, the singers are directly in front of the limited audience, bringing an immediacy to these five variable short pieces.

Then there is the excitement of experiencing a new form. The fifteen minute opera is more like a poem than a traditional epic, exploring a single theme or, as in Remembrance Day by Louise Welch and Stuart MacRae, a short story. Across the performance, sex, death, ambition and the conflict between science and religion are all briefly explored in a format that is suggestive rather than conclusive. While this is a long way from traditional opera, it opens up new possibilities of staging and engagement with an audience.

This is most effective when the subject matter is slight and allusive. David Fennessy and Nicholas Bone offer Happy Story, a series of scenes that celebrate ambition and determination, and Margaret McCartney/Gareth William’s White captures a tiny tragedy from a tangential angle. The Lightning Rod Man is clumsy and overblown, both musically and dramatically, pitching a Whitmanesque mystic against a sensible materialist, while Remembrance Day, while it considers the importance of music, sacrifices intensity for the macabre.

However the entire programme has the sense of cohesion and development that puts it above most experimental or group works. As part of Scottish Opera’s brave moves to find new audiences, Five: 15 is thought-provoking and entertaining, probing possibilities without sacrificing quality.

Masculine and Feminine

Gareth K Vile generally enjoys being confused, with reservations.EVENT REVIEW BY GARETH K VILE.
PUBLISHED  IN THE SKINNY 08 MARCH 2009


Paulo Ribero is a regular presence at New Territories and his work, which hesitates between dance and drama, is a splendid example of the European aesthetic that this festival celebrates. Inspired by the poetry of Fernando Pessoa, and consisting of two complementary pieces, Masculine and Feminine attempts to filter Pessoa’s words through gender.

The two shows share a gentle pace, a good-humoured ramble that moves between speech and dance, with fragments of poetry suddenly emerging, and the intensity ramped up by dramatic lighting. As usual, Tramway is the perfect venue: small enough to be intimate and allow a direct connection between audience and performers, yet large enough for the action to spread out and relax.

Masculine - four men, music by Frank Zappa, a table-top adorned with cut-up pornography and a football - is thematically clearer. Using the building blocks of male bonding, sport and sex, the company meditate lazily on the fact of being male. Conversations are a series of interrupted monologues, and the great show given to acts of physical prowess - framed by an aesthetic that recalls a 1970s television variety show - is as boastful as it is impressive.

As the programme note suggests for Feminine, high heels replace the football and the dance is more sensuous and less comic. The connection between the four dancers and one actress is tight and comfortable, as the actress longs to become a dancer and the early chat is replaced by a series of technically powerful dances. Femininity is perceived in broad strokes - make up, weight issues, glamour and community, with a sense of humour and warmth.

These generalisations - perhaps even the very division of the shows - do ignore some subtleties of the relationship between the sexes and the idiosyncrasies of each individual. Ribeiro uses the poetry to connect the works, but the shared speech about how “monotonising life to avoid monotony” has the same resonance in both works - that of a rather patronising author trying to praise the ordinary man. Only when the dancers discuss their own dancing does a slightly more personal angle reveal itself.

The contradiction, perhaps deliberately built into the work, is in the sophistication of the art and the stereotypical material. This is, both technically and theatrically, a complex and layered choreography: it grapples with some grand themes through obvious signifiers. That it draws no clear conclusions, eschewing a natural conclusive finale for a fade into the dark, suggests that even the simplest symbols of masculinity and femininity are capable of yielding depth and nuance.

This can be frustrating, while it is also thought-provoking and careful. Companhia Paulo Ribeiro might leave the audience in doubt, but they propose questions - not just about gender but the way that it is constructed.